Modern Child Marriage in the United States

Abidah Bin Salmen, an 11-year-old Muslim girl in Saudi Arabia, was forcibly married to an imam at her local mosque after he raped her. Once married, he often abused and raped her, impregnating her six times by the time she was 17. Except her name was not Abidah Bin Salmen; it was Sherry Johnson, and she was not a Muslim girl in Saudi Arabia. She was a Christian girl in Tallahassee, Florida who was forcibly married to her local churches deacon. After he raped her, Her parents made her marry him because they did not want to cause a scandal in their strict Apostolic Church. He did continue to rape and abuse her, giving her six children by the age of 17, and she was expelled from high school.

Ask anyone in the West about child brides, and they will probably conjure images of repressive, conservative Islamic countries in the Middle East and North Africa. They might even point to some Hindu practices in India, but it is always somewhere else in a faraway land where nobody knows right from wrong. The West is free, after all. We have rights and liberties, Capitalism and Democracy, Individualism and Jesus. But we have our fair share of human and civil rights abuses, not all of which we commit overseas. Right here at home in the Good Ol’ Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, our government is sanctioning the rape and imprisonment of prepubescent children from West Coast to East, and your typical American Patriot is the perpetrator.

Sherry was married in 1971, but this phenomenon has been present since the country’s inception and it still remains today. It’s bigger than you might think; Unchained at Last, an advocacy group specialized in preventing child marriage, analyzed marriage license data from 38 states and found that 167,000 minors were married between 2000 and 2010. The data for the other 12 states and the District of Columbia were not available, but by applying the strong correlation between population and child marriage rates to those states they were able to estimate that 248,000 minors were married during that decade. Yes, you heard that right; that’s about 68 children being forced into a life they did not ask for every day. To make matters even more sinister and perverted, 77% of these cases were of underage girls marrying adult men, often with an age difference that would constitute statutory rape. The girls are in some cases as young as 10, 11 or 12, and the men can be as old as 60 in extreme cases.

But how could this be possible? Isn’t 18 the minimum legal age to marry? Yes, it is, but with the exceptions of New Jersey and Delaware who passed laws just earlier this year, every state allows parental consent or a judge's approval to marry a minor. Most of those states have a minimum age below which even those exceptions are not allowed, which is usually 15, 16, or 17. However, 18 states currently do not have any limit whatsoever. Theoretically, a 5-year-old girl could get married to a 40-year-old man in almost half of the country. 

“Oh, look how cute the Flower Girl is!”

“That's not the Flower Girl, that’s the bride.”

A little girl could be sobbing next to her parents while they sign the contract, and the court clerk would not be able to do anything to help.

You might suspect this is just confined to extreme religious sects and immigrants from regressive cultures, but as Nicholas Syrett, author of the book, “American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States,” noted, child marriage rates are the highest in southern states like Alabama, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Rural western states like Idaho also make the list. This is probably because they have higher rates of poverty, and are home to dogmatic, religious conservatives. They butcher sex education in schools, act surprised when their daughters get pregnant at age 15, then hand them a bible and a marriage certificate and tell them abortion is evil. Additionally, Syrett observed that when immigration was at its peak in the 1910’s and 1920’s, native-born whites from native-born white parents still had higher child marriage rates than 1^st and 2^nd generation immigrants.

One 15-year-old girl named Heather from Idaho married 24-year-old Aaron after he took her virginity and impregnated her. She was so drunk she didn’t remember the night, but she suppressed her conflicted emotions because she had a bigger problem. After her parents found out she was pregnant, they discussed their options. Abortion was murder, so that was immediately off the table. Heather refused to give the baby up for adoption, so that left only one option: get married. The father took them to Missouri where only one parental signature was needed because he knew the mother would not approve of the marriage. However, she already told the police her daughter was raped after finding out about the pregnancy, and nine weeks in, Heather had a miscarriage. Aaron was sentenced to 15 years in prison for statutory rape, and Heather’s father was put in jail for several months for being an accomplice to the rape. But this case ended much more justly than most. Commonly, judges will waive the rape charge if the couple gets married, and the minor does not have the power to file for annulment or divorce. The only reason Heather was able to escape Aaron, who ended up unemployed and making her do all of the bread-winning and household work, was because her mother annulled the marriage for her and called the police.

This entire travesty stemmed from a weird maxim the family held with their faith: If you get pregnant, you get married. They did not care that she was 15, or that the father was legally a rapist; they just could not break that damn rule. Now Heather has dropped out of high school, is living off a minimum wage job, and has been traumatized by the whole experience, simply because her father was a vile, wicked man who put church above family.

The effects of marrying too young are quite well documented. Unchained at Last collected some of the most horrible statistics, such as women who married at 18 or younger have a 23 percent greater risk of disease, including heart attack, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. Child marriage is also associated with higher rates of sexually transmitted infections; early pregnancies, higher rates of death resulting from childbirth, unwanted pregnancies, malnutrition in the offspring, and increased rates of psychiatric disorders. A 2011 study showed child marriage in the US was significantly associated with all mental disorders except pathological gambling and histrionic and dependent personality disorders. Other prevalent disorders among women who married as children include major depressive disorder, nicotine dependence and specific phobias. Women who marry before 19 are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school than are their unmarried counterparts, and four times less likely to complete college. They are also often unable to access education and work opportunities, in part because they tend to have more children, earlier and more closely spaced. Women who marry early are more likely to earn lower wages and are significantly more likely to live in poverty. Teenage mothers who marry before childbirth are less likely to return to school than teenage mothers who do not marry; overall, teenage mothers who marry and then divorce are more likely to end up living in poverty, while teenage mothers who stay single have better long-term financial outcomes. Women who married before 18 are three times more likely to have been beaten by their spouses than women who married at 21 or older. Those who marry before 18 have a stunning 70% to 80% chance of getting divorced.

What is the lesson here? Child marriage is always the worst choice, both practically and morally. The only person it helps is the despicable pedophile who wants to escape prosecution for statutory rape. As of May this year, 28 states did not take any action towards reform, and Alaska, Maryland, and Washington rejected proposals. Many other states are pending a decision, and some who have passed laws still allow for child marriage in some circumstances. So when your state representative votes against reforming the laws that allow it, you should righteously stage a protest, vote them out of office, and shame them alongside the rest of your community. The primary barrier to passing reform has unequivocally been the disgusting legislators across the country that make excuses for the practice despite the chants of advocacy groups, and although progress is being made every year, this gruesome practice will never end until good people like you spread awareness or donate here.